That's the second consecutive quarter that Houston wage-earners beat the national average, after a sluggish 2013 that saw pay in the energy capital flatten.

Average wage earners weren't the only ones who had flat paydays last year: Some compensation packages for the chief executives of oil and gas companies wilted under shareholder pressure.

Pay in Houston's biggest industry, oil and gas, has climbed 20.5 percent since 2006, the highest total wage growth of any industry in the last eight years, PayScale noted in its latest quarterly index last week.

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"Whatever the dominant industry in the metro area is, that's what's going to drive wages in the city," Katie Bardaro, lead economist and analytics manager for Payscale, said in an interview. "But even for people not in that industry, you'll still see wage growth, because money is still cycling throughout the local economy."

Still, Houston's recent wage growth hasn't reached the heights it did before the economy slumped starting in 2008.

In the April-June period of 2007, Houston's annual wages shot up nearly 6 percent, towering over the national average's 2 percent growth, and higher than Houston's 5 percent growth in the final quarter of 2012.

Before the recession, one of the biggest drivers of wage growth was inflation, Bardaro said.

"We had higher inflation in the pre-recession times, but we have seen some inflation in the last few quarters," she said.